PODCAST SHOWNOTES

Welcome to the Six Figure Personal Stylist Podcast, the ultimate no-BS business podcast for ambitious personal stylists ready to build a six-figure and beyond personal styling business.

You won't hear the typical snoozefest business advice that most personal stylists get told all of the time. Nope. Instead, I'll be sharing business-building strategies that will help you create a killer personal brand, a cult following of loyal personal styling clients, and make a ton of cash while creating lasting style transformations for your clients.

I'm Nicole Otchy, your host and a former personal stylist of 14 years who built a lucrative styling business in three major cities, but only after spending years trying to crack the six-figure styling business code without burning out. And now I'm here to tell you how to do exactly the same. Let's get into it.

Today, I want to talk a little bit about how our businesses feel to us on a day-to-day basis because this is the easiest thing to let slip away, yet, I think it's so important in terms of the impact it can make on the actions we take and how much we earn because it really shapes our relationship with our business.

The last month or so, the last four to six episodes have really been focused on tactics and business-building strategies. I'm all obviously, four of those things are important to me, but I think it's important to shift the energy a little bit, as we head into spring, stylists tend to get really busy in fall and spring.

My goal is for them to be busy all the time, but you'll see a natural uptick in those seasons. I think it's an important conversation to be having around things that maybe are less tactical and maybe a little bit more mindset or perspective-shifting as you all start that season in your business.

The truth is that running a business is very much like being in a relationship. In fact, I think thinking of your business as another relationship in your life is super helpful to get a bigger-picture perspective when things feel hard. Some days things are going to feel great and some days things are going to feel challenging, but your intention in your mindset shape your overall experience in the relationship.

It really is true in business, and it's true obviously in our personal relationships with other human beings, but we can—and I am going to raise my hand and say that this is my default mode—treat our business as something that is just supposed to serve us 24/7 without thinking about what we are putting into the relationship. It's easy to be performative in our business and spend a lot of time thinking about how our businesses look to other people, but how they feel to us is the most important thing.

It's interesting because so many of the things we're going to talk about today are things that, if you reflect on them, are relevant to being a transformational stylist. Because in that position as a stylist, you tend to think about how the client feels about the clothes, not how the clothes always impact other people.

That is the secondary part. Of course, we always are thinking about particularly those of us who worked in the personal branding space, what is what we're wearing saying to other people. But it's irrelevant if the person wearing the clothes hasn't decided what they mean to them.

How your business looks to other people is very similar. It may look successful. It may even be successful on paper, but it may not feel successful. That is something I see with a lot of various established stylists who are already at six figures. There's just a sense of like, “I do really like what I do, but there's a way that I'm not getting energy from my business anymore. There's a way where I don't really feel inspired,” and sometimes success makes it hard to make changes.

I want to talk a little bit about this idea of how to make your business more enjoyable to you, and how to like the day-to-day because it's something I am actively working on. I will say that the business is in a situation where I'm fortunate in that there's a lot of room and places and opportunities to grow, but I often don't keep my promises to myself when it comes to keeping myself excited and engaged because I'm head down working all the time.

I don't love what that does to my energy, so I'm really spending time this year trying to think of ways that I can have more adventure, and more fun in my life. I joked with a client the other day that my resolution for this year was to be less serious, and less intense, we'll see that. I'm not making any promises, especially on this podcast.

But that is something I would like to cultivate in myself. I think, "Oh, that's a personal activity. That's an activity for my personal life, my family life, or my friendships.” But it's not true because everywhere I go, there I am. Bringing that spirit into my business and also having ways that I helped try to bring it out in my clients is exciting to me.

That's why I thought this would be a fun topic to talk about because I don't really have this figured out. I have how to make six figures figured out, but I don't have this totally figured out. These are some of the things that I am thinking through.

The foundation of this, because like I said two minutes ago, I'm not going to promise you I'm not going to be a little bit intense, but the foundation of this that I think is super critical and why I had me thinking a lot about transformational styling is that in order to get into the right headspace on this and have more enjoyment and more fun and more ease in your business, you have to do this one thing or else the rest of it falls apart.

You have to shift into trying to understand yourself and away from trying to fix yourself. One of the reasons I think many of us get caught up in our business is that we are obsessed with being better and improving ourselves and we come from a self-improvement culture, a mentality of you're not living up to your potential if you're not always trying to grow if you're not always trying to scale, if you're not always trying to be better.

It's interesting because I now look back at my styling career and I think, "Oh, that behavior is very much at odds with being truly transformational." Because it gives us this lie that you need to always be almost criticizing yourself in order to be the next best level of yourself.

You need to be punishing. You need to be unrelenting. I started to think of being consistent and steady in my business versus being unrelenting. That energy feels terrible to me of constantly going, going, going. Everyone's going to be different in terms of what feels good for them.

But I do think that this concept of trying to be better from the perspective of fixing yourself makes it really, really hard to enjoy your business. What happens is that many of us burn ourselves out just trying to maintain habits that don't align with our natural preferences and tendencies because we think we should.

A good example of this because of something I see a lot in the online space is the obsessive conversation around morning routines and needing to have a morning routine. But you don't really need that to be successful. You can have it if it feels important to you.

But I think a lot of people, especially when they are first starting out a business and they don't really know what to do, they get really obsessive with the routines. The only routine that's really got to make the biggest difference in your business is doing the things that matter consistently.

There's only a handful of things that move business forward: marketing, connecting with people, understanding your audience better, making sure that your business model, the basic math that should only take an hour to do actually is going to meet your goals, and that there are enough hours in the day to realistically follow through on the plan you have.

That's it. Everything else after that is being consistent and showing up. I think lots of us think, "Oh, I have to do this 19-part plan in the morning in order to set myself up for the day." Maybe you do or maybe you don't and that's actually the problem.

If you're someone, for example, that works best at night and you write your best content at night, why are you forcing yourself to be at your desk at 8:00 AM? These are the little examples of enjoying your business from a place of understanding yourself versus fixing yourself and thinking, "I need to be at my desk at 8:00 AM because that's what productive people do.”

Maybe those people are productive, but I know tons of people who don't work that way and they're incredibly productive. It's really about remembering that we all signed up thinking we were going to have these businesses and that they were going to give us this freedom or whatever the goals were.

We can make as much money as we want, we can have freedom, and we can do what we want with our time, but more often than not, what that actually looks like in our business is accepting how we want to spend our time and then in small ways having that be reflected in our day-to-day activities.

If you're constantly trying to follow somebody else's routine or be a certain way because you think that's what success looks like, maybe at the beginning of your business you have to do that just to feel it out. Just our clients have to try on clothes that don't really feel like them to be able to explain why they don't feel like them, not to keep stuffing themselves in clothes that don't feel right.

In the same way, I wonder for so many of us why we keep trying to force ourselves into routines that don't work. Now, obviously, I think trying to understand yourself is not the same as never bettering yourself. You're still going to feel uncomfortable in your business because you're going to do new things and new things are uncomfortable and our brains want to keep us safe.

That's the way this goes because we're human beings. We're all in this together. But I do think often about how the real freedom in being an entrepreneur and owning your own business is being able to offset the negative things or the hard things about being a human and doing new things and building a business or being an expert in any field.

This can work in an office and still be committed to bettering yourself and to growing with an organization, but to have the freedom of your time to work at home or work in different contexts that you want to as an entrepreneur and as a business owner and not take up the opportunity to make little moments better, to offset how uncomfortable it can be, is something I think about a lot.

We tend to think, "Oh, I can take a week off and be with my kids," and that's great. That's wonderful. But we usually only do that a couple of times a year. In fact, I know people who take less vacation doubt that they're entrepreneurs than they did back when they had a job that paid them to take off two or three weeks a year.

That's something I think about a lot, why am I waiting for big chunks of time to take off in my business when I could be doing it in smaller bursts and enjoying myself more? All of this is important with respect to understanding yourself because how you're going to do that, how you're going to build that enjoyment into your business really needs to come from understanding yourself or else it will just be another thing when you're to-do lists that you're forcing yourself to do, not another way of being in your business and in your life.

I can't give you a formula for this because I'm still trying to figure it out myself but I can tell you to look at anywhere where there's just a lot of resistance to doing things the way other people do. I can give you a couple of other tools that really helped me with how I've designed my business and some of the things I'm thinking about.

The first is human design, which some people believe in, and some people don't. I don't know if there's anything to be all that critical of. You either find it helpful or you don't. I don't know that it has any other deeper moral issue, but I'm a manifestor in human design, which means my energy is very inconsistent.

I go through bursts of creation and then I'm excited and I'm really revved up but then I need a lot of rest time. I know that about myself. I've always hated that about myself and thought that it meant I was lazy or there was something wrong with me in some way but when I realized this about my human design, it really helped me build a business in a way that makes sense and to design my offers in a way that works for me and also to design how I market my business and the tools that I use so that I am creating lots of content and then using other tools to disseminate it even when I have lower energy.

That's been really helpful and if you're a different human design type, you will maybe be able to look at the fact that you have lots of bursts of energy and you don't need a lot of little downtime like I do. That may be a good way for you to plan your business.

Well, another one that I found really helpful that I suggest to a lot of my clients is the book The Four Tendencies by Gretchen Rubin. She wrote The Happiness Project. I actually think that Four Tendencies is one of Gretchen Rubin's best works. If you go Google The Four Tendencies, there's a website that she has and you can take a quiz and find out what your tendency is, but it's about motivation style.

I'll put that in the show notes. It's about motivation styles and how we set up our lives to work with our motivation style. It's helped me tremendously. It's something I talk to my clients a lot about versus being like, “I wish I could just follow through on things on my own.”

Sometimes we need other people and other things outside of us in order to be accountable to do our best. Instead of fighting that in, for example, myself, I've noticed that if I really want to hit a goal, I get a coach or I get a Pilates teacher or I pay to have the accountability that I need until it becomes a habit and then I'm good.

I think that the majority of people actually have that tendency. They have that tendency in their motivation style. It’s like 50% of people. Then there are other people who are questioners, and other people who are rebels, and they are the opposite in a lot of ways.

That has been helpful for me to stop fighting myself and trying to fix myself and just accept myself because again we can make some of these things moral problems with ourselves and they're just not. It's just not a moral issue or something that we need to expend energy on to be like, “You know what, sometimes I need a little extra support.” Like, “Okay. Why hold yourself back because of that?”

Those are some things that have really helped me. I've also started journaling a little bit more. I'm not super consistent in that but I know a lot of people have found that useful for understanding themselves better so I will offer that as well.

Another one that I think is useful for stylists specifically that I want to offer is I'm not going to talk about marketing tactics, but I want to give you a way of thinking about marketing because this will be the biggest thing you have to do in your business, whether you or somebody else does it, you do not have a business if you're not marketing it.

Even if you're getting a lot of referrals and stuff like that, you will never have consistent cash flow if you're waiting for other people to remember to refer you. That's just really tricky. You have to market and focusing on how your marketing feels to you is critical.

There is definitely something to be said for the fact that you should be on platforms where your client is, but the world is a big place and most people are on most platforms. I think that that's one of them. I wish more stylists didn't feel like they had to be in every place at once because it usually isn't going well for them and really just focused on one place at a time and growing in those spaces.

One of the things that's most helpful once you figure out what areas or what ways of creating content depending on the platform, maybe you like video or maybe you prefer to write, so you're on Substack. Maybe you like to write and do short-form videos, so Instagram is good for you.

Maybe you like long-form videos, so you prefer YouTube. Maybe you like to blog, so you connect your blog to Pinterest or you like to podcast. Whatever that is, I think that's really important because in order to be consistent, you want to figure out where are my people, what platform, and how I like to communicate my message.

But really, really, really after those tactical things are done, the way that we, especially as stylists, I don't know any other group of people that this is more applicable to, but looking at your marketing as a form of connection will change the game for you.

Because the way that your marketing is going to be its most powerful is by you showing and demonstrating how well you know the group of people that you most want to work with, which is why when people think of niching, they think of it in this very specific way, but really it's about understanding the core life experiences, daily experiences, and outlook of the people that you want to work with most.

Sometimes that means demographics and what we typically think of as a niche but often in this day and age, it actually doesn't. If you get that and that is what you're really focusing on in your marketing efforts, then you're just having to relate and understand and be in conversation with.

Relating to people and understanding people is something that most stylists really love about their job. This perspective shift has helped a lot, a lot of stylists I work with who struggled with being consistent in their marketing, really beating themselves up, or having a lot of “shoulds” in their language or marketing.

When they get that if you focus more on the people you want to serve and you are committed to them and you think of your marketing as a dialogue and a back and forth and you sit down and you say to yourself, “What do they need to hear from me today?” which is why, for example, I'm doing this topic, your marketing is going to feel really different than if you're sitting there thinking about, “What kind of content do I need to create to make them hire me?”

The energy is just really different. You're also in the appropriate mindset for what it actually takes to be successful in your business, which is the long haul. That's it. That's what it takes. It takes launching things or trying things and talking about things a lot of different ways over time, perfecting that message, and talking to your audience. Then you have to go back to it and do it again and again. You might as well enjoy the people you gotta do that with because that's the truth of how it is.

There's no marketing PDF, there are better and worse ways to say things, to do things, but there isn't another secret to the game. You see big brands creating communities and it's so they can have access to these relationships to understand how they're being perceived by their audience.

It's not a mistake. Relational marketing and this client-led business that I talk about over and over again on here is really just about connecting in your messaging and in your marketing and even in your selling and seeing it as a long game because that connection-based conversation is actually the thing that is required to stick around long enough to get people to listen.

When we face our to-do list, and we're like, "Oh, my God, not more marketing. I hate marketing," which is the number one thing I hear from people. I just want to remind you that if you look at it as a relationship, again, you're connecting to your audience versus telling them some things they have to say or trying to figure out how to get them to hire you, it will change the energy in your business.

Because marketing is the thing that most of us are doing at least for a while all on our own and it feels really personal because it's us and our face and our name, this energy shift, this focus shift can make a really huge difference to how your business feels every day.

The third one is finding creative outlets outside of your business. I am admittedly horrible at this. Horrible. So bad. The only thing I've mastered in this area is knowing not to get my dopamine hits from my business anymore.

This is actually why I bring this up. I know I talked about this in an earlier episode, I'm trying to remember what episode it was, but this idea that we look to our business often to validate us and to give us that jolt of excitement, and often those two things are connected, so we look to our business for a dopamine hit and we change our offers, we get excited about our branding, we do the shiny thing in our business because it makes us feel a certain way, and I want you to feel good about your business, but I think if it's something that you're constantly chasing, you'll see very quickly that if you keep chasing new things, you don't talk about something long enough for your audience to even notice, whether it be an offer or a marketing tactic or whatever.

Because it does take about 90 days for people to even notice if you change things. You gotta repeat yourself a lot. If you're constantly changing things, you'll never give yourself the opportunity for you and your audience to be on the same page so you can have that connection-based relationship I just talked about.

Finding creative sources or even sources of pleasure and joy outside of your business, particularly ones that allow you to feel a sense of agency and improvement and skill building, it doesn't have to be serious, it can be anything, it can be pottery, which is something I'd love to learn, or it could even be, for me, one of the things I'm trying to get better at is having things on my calendar to look forward to because getting out of the house and doing those things when I tend to be chained to my desk gives me ideas about my business, it makes me excited and makes me feel more balanced as a person when I come back to work.

Finding creativity and basically, dopamine hits in the most basic way of saying it, outside of your business is really critical to how you feel in your business. It can be something as simple as a walk because it gets endorphins going. I think I have often, again, many of you, I'm sure, complicated it.

Then now I have to create this 90-step hobby that requires a lot of things and a lot of time. I also have a three-year-old, so where am I going to get that alone in order to do it? Then I was like, “Maybe I'm being a little over the top on this. Maybe I could just go do a puzzle.”

Maybe it doesn't have to be that deep because again, trying to be less intense. I'm just offering to you as someone who struggles deeply, and maybe some of you are better at this than you have tips, hit me up on Instagram, I want to hear what your tips are, but the more I have tried to even prioritize having dinners with friends on my calendar or having things outside of me and my work outside of my day-to-day, doing the laundry, having things outside of responsibilities of a family and a home and a business with people that rely on me has been a practice of not making it overwhelming or another thing on my to-do list.

Something I actually want to look forward to is now what I think of when I think of creativity, I do not make it a bigger thing because what I'm really looking for is a feeling, not necessarily a hobby. A hobby would be great if I had the time, but remembering that maybe it doesn't need to be that I take 50 pottery classes and become a master potter, maybe I literally just go with a friend on a random Saturday night and do an intro to pottery class for two hours, maybe it doesn't have to be so overwhelming.

Finding creativity outside of your business so that you're not searching for your dopamine hits inside your business and you can get some fresh perspective to bring in has been something that when I have been able to prioritize, that has helped me, so maybe it will help you.

Then the last one, that's obvious, but I want to give a little nuance to it is tracking your wins and tracking your progress. Progress is probably even more important than wins, but we focus a lot on what's almost missing, this whole idea that I was talking about the top of the episode of trying to fix yourself and trying to change yourself.

But when we focus on what's missing, we fail to recognize how far we've come. This is something that I will probably talk about in depth again, but I did a lesson in my mini-mind and my marketing and sales mini-mind talking about how to properly see your own progress in your business because one of the things I am constantly doing as a coach and a consultant is reflecting back to my clients where they started, which is an enormous privilege that I get to have because I have such a high retention rate and so many of my clients stay on with me for a while that I get to experience this incredible gift of their growth and watch that and even because we're on social media, I get to see that.

It's really one of the things that I live for in this career, to be honest with you. What I see is that a lot of us don't have the skills of learning how to measure our own progress and to see ourselves accurately. There's a book called The Gap and The Gain, which is an amazing book. I really like it.

It's a pretty quick read, too. It talks about the power of tracking our progress over our perfection to actually gain mastery in our life. What happens is we think of like, say you have 500 followers on Instagram, we tell ourselves, “I'll be happy when I'm at 1,000.” But at 500, we forget we started from zero. If we actually let ourselves look at, “Well, from 0 to 500 and however much time, and I have a community of people that talk to me and actually listen, actually, interact with me on social media and respond to my stories and they do all these things,” if I had an appreciation for that, I would be more energized to show up and get to the next level, versus looking at the next level of how I don't have a thousand people and beating myself up for having to be there sooner.

What's important about looking backward, where we've been versus where we're not yet is that we see our own growth and we can start to catalog, “Well, in getting from 0 to 500 followers, I had to learn a lot of different types of skills. I had to learn copyright. I had to learn how to have conversations with my audience. I had to learn how to overcome my visibility blocks. I had to do all of these things.” Then you can appreciate your effort.

When we look forward, we are not appreciating our effort. In fact, what we often do is underestimate how long it's going to take for us to get there. We think that in our pursuit of 1,000 followers or 10,000 followers or a million followers, whatever that looks for you, we forget that it's actually a pretty long journey usually to the things we truly want.

We have false expectations of how we meet goals. In doing that, what happens is we are unable to truly appreciate how far we've come and that depletes our energy to go where we need to. Tracking your wins in terms of client feedback and the things that they tell you they like is important too because you're going to have these when you're going to get bad feedback and you want to make sure you're making your brain have to balance both.

You have to have a folder somewhere where you're going to see your wins on the days you feel like you've had a lot of losses to remind you to keep going. We're always going to prioritize the negative because that's how our brain keeps us safe. That is a couple of times in this episode, it's not a mistake.

A lot of the things I think about in terms of making your day better are about offsetting the natural tendencies we have and those can skew negative from a biological and evolutionary perspective, that is what, as someone who's looked a lot into behavior change and identity change over the last year, that is what you need to know about yourself to almost outsmart yourself.

That's why a lot of the stuff that I've talked about today is related to the mental tricks to make things feel better in your life so that it becomes your norm in your baseline instead of feeling bad or beating yourself up or looking for ways to be hard on yourself, to drive yourself and keep yourself going, instead of that, making the baseline be more enjoyable so you can stay in the game and be the right kind of leader as stylists for your clients because we're trying to help other people change.

If our relationship to change is not amazing, then that's going to be problematic for how we guide people in their journey, especially like I said, especially as transformational stylists.

I hope that some of these tips were useful and you can take what's useful, leave what's not, and just marinate on how you want your business to feel this year. As you go into a busy season and think about what you could do to even just make things a little bit easier or nicer or feel good because I know all you are out there telling your clients, "Don't save your good clothes for a special time," but let me remind you also, don't save your happiness for when you think, "Oh, well, I'll be successful when I make this much," or, “When I have this type of client.”

Let yourself be happy now because it's actually a habit I'm learning. It's not something that most of us go to naturally. How amazing for us to be able to cultivate it in a business that's also trying to cultivate that in other people. I will talk to you for the next episode.

Thank you so much for hanging out with me. It turns out that social proof is actually pretty important. So if you could help me out, I'd so appreciate it. If you just had a quick free moment and could leave me a rating or review on the podcast app, that would be killer. And even better, if you wanted to share this episode on Instagram and tag me, that would totally make my day and it would bring so much more awareness to the podcast and would help other stylists just like you who are looking to build lucrative styling business because the better each of us does, the better all of us do. Thanks for hanging out with me and I'll chat with you next time.